52 Facts About William Orpen

Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, was an Irish artist who mainly worked in London.

William Orpen was a naturally talented painter, and six weeks before his thirteenth birthday was enrolled at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art.

William Orpen would include mirrors in his pictures to create images within images, add false frames and collages around his subjects, and often make pictorial references to works by other artists in his own paintings.

William Orpen's two-metre-wide painting The Play Scene from Hamlet won the Slade composition prize in 1899.

William Orpen depicted the 'Arnolfini' convex glass in several other paintings, including A Mere Fracture in 1901, during this period.

William Orpen ended their relationship in 1901, and Orpen married Grace Knewstub, the sister-in-law of Sir William Rothenstein.

Between 1902 and 1915, William Orpen divided his time between London and Dublin.

William Orpen taught at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and his teaching influenced a generation of young Irish artists.

William Orpen's pupils included Sean Keating, Grace Gifford, Patrick Tuohy, Leo Whelan and Margaret Clarke.

From 1908 onwards, William Orpen exhibited works in the Royal Academy on a regular basis.

Between 1911 and 1913, in London, William Orpen painted a series of portraits, mostly three-quarter-length, of Vera Brewster, the wife of the writer Joe Horne.

Group portraits of a type known as conversation pieces were hugely popular and William Orpen painted several, most notably The Cafe Royal in London, and Homage to Manet, which showed Walter Sickert and several other artists and critics seated in front of Edouard Manet's Portrait of Eva Gonzalies.

William Orpen had worked on Homage to Manet since 1906 at his studio in South Bolton Gardens in Chelsea, where Lane had rooms.

In December 1915 William Orpen was commissioned into the Army Service Corps and reported for clerical duty at London's Kensington Barracks in March 1916.

William Orpen knew both Philip Sassoon, the private secretary to Sir Douglas Haig, and Sir John Cowans, the Quartermaster General of the British Army.

An officer from Kensington Barracks was appointed as his military aide, a car and driver were made available in France and William Orpen paid for a batman and assistant to accompany him.

William Orpen had arrived on the Somme three weeks after the German forces had pulled back to the Hindenburg Line.

Each day William Orpen would be driven to locations such as Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel or Ovillers-la-Boisselle to sketch Allied troops or German prisoners and record the devastation left by the Battle of the Somme amid the frozen and desolate landscape.

William Orpen returned to the Somme in August 1917 and found the landscape transformed.

William Orpen was well aware that this landscape was a vast graveyard.

William Orpen stopped using half-tones and half-shades and adopted a new palette of colours, characterised by the extensive use of weak purples, mauves and bright green, with large white spaces representing the effect of bright sunlight on the chalk soil, all under a strong cobalt blue sky.

Amid the derelict trenches, William Orpen claimed to have encountered soldiers who had been traumatised and shell-shocked by the fighting and made, at least, two paintings, A Man with a Cigarette and Blown Up, Mad, based on these meetings.

William Orpen spent part of September 1917 visiting airfields and during October 1917 he was based with No 56 Squadron near Cassel.

Late in 1917, William Orpen spent two weeks in hospital with blood poisoning.

Lee made it clear that if the title was intended as a joke it was in very bad taste coming so soon after the execution of Mata Hari but if the subject really was a spy then William Orpen could be facing a court-martial.

William Orpen gave Lee a fantastical story that the woman in the picture was a German spy who had been executed by the French but who, in an attempt to save herself, had at the last moment revealed herself naked in front of the firing squad.

Lee had William Orpen recalled to London to be reprimanded at the War Office.

William Orpen ignored this and, quite illegally, made his way back to France.

Lee dropped his objections to William Orpen working in France, and William Orpen agreed to rename the two pictures The Refugee.

In fact Arthur Lee had refused to pass nearly all of the paintings shown at Agnew's but William Orpen appealed to the Director of Military Intelligence, General George Macdonogh, and had him overruled.

Whilst the exhibition was in London, it was announced that William Orpen was donating all the works on display to the British government on the understanding that they should remain in their white frames and be kept together as a single body of work.

William Orpen made it clear he wished to remain in France and was keen to work in the newly liberated towns.

When William Orpen met the woman some time afterwards she was 'silent and motionless, except for one thumb which constantly twitched'.

William Orpen had been shocked to see a number of such burial mounds with, as he wrote, "arms and feet showing in lots of cases".

One day, even the broad-minded William Orpen was shocked to encounter three young French prostitutes offering their services next to a burial party at a gravesite.

William Orpen considered that the whole conference was being conducted with a lack of respect or regard for the suffering of the soldiers who fought in the war, and he attempted to address this in the third painting of the commission.

William Orpen sent Evelyn Saint-George a letter detailing the original layout and composition of the work.

William Orpen did receive some letters of appreciation from ex-servicemen and from family members of soldiers who had died in the war, but he still felt the need to issue a statement explaining the picture and his intentions.

The then Director of the IWM replied that he would be happy to accept the picture as it was, or however William Orpen wished to present it.

William Orpen painted out the soldiers and the painting was accepted by the Museum in 1928.

William Orpen continued to drink heavily and although he was separated from his wife, they never divorced.

William Orpen's 1921 Royal Academy submission was a portrait of the head chef at the Hotel Chatham in Paris.

William Orpen subsequently submitted Le Chef de l'Hotel Chatham, Paris to the Royal Academy as his diploma painting.

In 1925, William Orpen painted Sunlight, a brilliant depiction, in dappled sunlight, of a nude woman on a bed, behind whom hangs The Seine at Marly, the 1874 painting by Monet which William Orpen owned.

In 1922, William Orpen was reported to be receiving treatment in London for 'tobacco poisoning'.

In 1927, William Orpen accepted a commission to paint a portrait of David Lloyd George but the completed work was rejected as being too informal for such a senior politician.

The painting remained with William Orpen and was only purchased by the National Portrait Gallery after his death.

William Orpen's work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.

William Orpen became seriously ill in May 1931, and, after suffering periods of memory loss, died aged 52 in London, on 29 September 1931, and was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery.

William Orpen often portrayed himself in the act of painting and often created multiple images of himself.

In 1913 William Orpen painted himself with a golden version of his painting Sowing New Seed as a background.

William Orpen was a member or affiliated with the following organisations:.